Elisabet Vila

I was born in Berga, Catalonia and graduated with the degrees of Translation and Interpreting, and in Linguistics at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona) in 2011. My interest on psycholinguistics led me to conduct my final project of the Linguistics degree about language in ASD children. I also worked as a technical staff in a phonetics and phonology project in UPF. In 2011, I started my master in Applied Linguistics and Language Acquisition in Multilingual Contexts at the Universitat de Barcelona, where I also started my PhD in the program on Cognitive Science and Language, under the supervision of Professor Joana Roselló Ximenes and Professor Wolfram Hinzen. Since I started my PhD, I am also a teacher at Escola Xarxa (Berga).

My main research interest is the study of linguistic abnormalities across the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in order to achieve a more fine-grained linguistic profile through the spectrum. In more concrete terms, I am focused on the complexity of grammar in children with ASD between 6-14 years old. My research is focused on ASD comprehension of different types of questions in comparison to typically developing children. This linguistic ability may influence their performance in ToM tasks and visual support may help with that. I am working on the hypothesis that there is a correlation between this linguistic profile and the cognitive which can provide a better understanding of the role of language in mind.

2015 (Otávio Mattos, Elisabet Vila, Camelia Dascalu and Kristen Schroeder): “Correlations between atypical language development and the overuse of imperative communication in autism”. At the conference “Autism and the Foundations of Language and Communication” (Dublin, 27th-29th March).

2013: “Language Deficits in ASD as an Impairment of Grammar of Language” (PhD Proposal).